Elepha, a last-mile distribution company that delivers essential goods to rural communities, was looking for funding to scale its model

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Case Studies

Elepha

Technology for the BoP

By David Infante

The opportunity

The Consumer Product Goods (CPG) companies face several challenges when it comes to attend the rural areas in Colombia because of the lack of well-developed transportation infrastructure, unreliable telecommunications and energy services, and widely dispersed consumers. These challenges make prices in these areas to be 20%-30% higher than in urban areas, making it more difficult to create a strong market. However, the rural demand of consumer products is growing faster than ever in emerging economies, which creates a vast opportunity that CPGs are taking advantage of.

About Elepha

Founded in 2017, Elepha distributes basic consumer products to rural and peri-urban areas in the north and center parts of Colombia. This is achieved by empowering a women network and generating social and economic development opportunities. Elepha builds world-class partnerships with different CPGs allowing the company to offer more than 50 products in different categories to families in the rural and peri-urban areas. This can be done on account of both the tech-integrated operations that allow the efficient delivery of many goods and the motivated women network.

The company’s goals are to increase rural employability and income, as well as to increase the access to essential products for families in rural and peri-urban areas. Up to date, more than 9k women have joined Elepha’s network, and its presence covers more than 400 municipalities in Colombia, achieving the objectives set.

How we helped

AMPLO supported Elepha in funding rounds in order to implement its growth plan successfully. Organizations such as Alphamundi and Yunus invested +600KUSD to strengthen the growth of the women network and the logistical advances to reach new rural areas in Colombia.

Elepha was looking to take advantage of a $1.0bnUSD exponentially growing market reason why it partnered with AMPLO to BUILD an ambitious growth plan along two main dimensions:

Expand the women network: Increase the number of women working with the company from the regions that Elepha is already in and from new areas. Furthermore, Elepha expects to empower the women, which leads to a stronger and more motivated network.
Strengthen operations: Expand product portfolio and categories with additional partnerships and improve logistics and operations.

Expected results

Combined, these investments will:

Allow 518,000 households in the rural and peri-urban areas of Colombia to access consumer products.
Include +35,000 active women in the network.
Increase the average income of women in the network by 18%.
Increase the number of people that access to credits to approximately 117,000 people.
Disburse more than 463 credit lines to women with the purpose of staying active in the network.

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